Ken Price

Attention sculptors: North American Midway Entertainment has found that cellophane wrapping woodblocks in cellophane is more secure than nailing it together. This wood is used as roller coaster under-girdling. [The Toronto Star]

Walter Robinson really likes Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron’s show at the Met. These portraits are a little romantic for our taste—her portraits are sometimes blurred in a way that seems cloying—but Robinson notes we aren’t the only people who have felt this way. [Artspace Magazine]

John Yau has some really smart insights on the Ken Price show. A favorite: “There is something stiff and flat-footed about the drawings, which I am sure Price was aware of, but which didn’t deter him from drawing every day. The fact that he was unembarrassed by his draftsmanship goes a long way toward explaining how adventuresome he could be, especially in clay.” [Hyperallergic]

Pompeii is in need of some serious conservation. So much so, that Unesco has warned Italy that it will be placed on the “World Heritage in Danger” list if steps to conserve it aren’t taken. Apparently overflowing water from house gutters is causing the detachment of wall frescoes and damage to the mosaics. [The Art Newspaper]

Anybody need a house in Florida with a water park? Celine Dion’s selling hers for 72.5 million. [Newslook]

The Cooper Hewitt Museum is now collecting code. The museum has bought Planetary, an iPad application that visualizes music as planets in space. Drafts of the code were put in a “curatorial folder” and are available to be downloaded, replicated, and modified by the public. [Cooper-Hewitt]

Rising rents in San Francisco are forcing galleries out of its downtown district. Four dealers have moved to Lower Potrero Hill. [The Art Newspaper]

Zaha Hadid is among 45 international architects that will participate in the Kazakhstan expo 2017 themed around alternative energy. If we are to believe the balloon filled mock-ups, the expo has no qualms wasting helium. [Design Boom]

Summer is here, and it’s hot. If going to the beach sounds painful, we’ve got a suggestion: museums. Thankfully, the air conditioned galleries of New York’s museums have plenty of worthwhile shows to check out. (Just don’t try to go to the rooftop gallery at the Met; they’ve closed that today due to the heat.) Below, we’ve rounded up a whopping list of 16 fantastic museum shows we’re going to check out.

In London, a new project modelled after the Highline will connect two disparate gallery neighborhoods from the Garden Museum to Vauxhall. [The Art Newspaper]

Buzzfeed Founder Jonah Peretti and Artist and Filmmaker Miranda July talk about email, thanks to July’s new project “We Think Alone”. The project asks a bunch of stars to reveal their email correspondence. It’s a good conversation, mostly because it feels personal. [The Moment]

Lots of the love for the Fred Valentine show up at Sometimes. We gotta say, those paintings look great, but can anyone tell us where the gallery’s located? [Two Coats of Paint, The L Magazine]

Roberta Smith reminds us that Ken Price’s “Zoo” at Matthew Marks Gallery is a great entry point into his current retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Drawing Center. [The New York Times]

The Bruce High Quality Foundation gets an A for effort in a condescending review of their retrospective Ode to Joy at the Brooklyn Museum. [The New York Times]

Everyone is getting really excited about this NeverWet spray, including us. [AdWeek]

Andrew M. Goldstein, Rachel Corbett, and Alex Greenberger think arts organizations are right to be nervous about the Bloomberg philanthropy coming to an end. They cite 2.8 billion spent on the arts across Bloomberg’s three terms. [Artspace Magazine]

The city budget gives MoMA PS1 $3 million to buy gallery space in a nearby apartment building. No such luck for the South Street Seaport Museum. [Brownstoner]

“I like Mr. Turrell’s work well enough” Roberta Smith on the James Turrell exhibition at the Guggenheim. Despite the way it sounds, (if you’ll excuse the pun), the review is glowing. [The New York Times]

With James Turrell at the Guggenheim, the summer solstice making his 1986 “Meeting” at MoMA PS1 an enticing destination for sunbathing, as well as retrospectives in Houston and Los Angeles, it would seem the artist is on top of the world. That said, he has recently declared one of his works in Dallas “destroyed” due to unwelcome real estate development. [Hyperallergic]

Turkish artist and choreographer Erdem Gündüz stood still as an act of protest in Taksim Square, Istanbul this week. The artist has garnered a small following of fellow standers who in turn have been awarded the hashtags #direnankara and #duranadam (standingman, standingwoman) [ArtInfo]

What is happening this week? Thursday is happening. After the Venice Biennale and Frieze, galleries are back on track with mega-Thursday opening nights, boasting the arrival of fun summer group shows. Jew York! The Kitchen! Emerging! Established! All of it’s going into one big pot. Time for some fun.